She couldn't have. No one could have told her. She didn't know that the victim had cancer, so she obviously had to have come to that conclusion from a different angle. He tried to focus, tried to imagine his sister entering a room she had treated as a sanctuary and opening a website on a computer that didn't look like it had been used in years. What could have drawn her in here? Why tonight? Why right now?
It was Warren's office.
Warren was a physician, a general practitioner who treated adults and children alike.
It hit him like a blow to the gut.
Warren had treated the dead girl in the bayou.
And now Vanessa was missing.
The front door had been standing ajar and half of the lights in the house were still on. He hadn't seen any signs of a struggle. If she had taken her car, the garage would have been open instead.
That left only two options.
Either she had set off on foot or someone had come for her and split in such a hurry that there hadn't even been time to close the door. Maybe she was just taking a walk to clear her head. It had been a rough day for her after all. But that wasn't how his sister worked.
He looked again at the monitor.
No. The osteosarcoma link ruled out the possible element of coincidence. Vanessa had made some sort of breakthrough that he hadn't yet. She had known the body in the swamp wasn't Emma's long before he did. She had been convinced that her daughter was still alive, and if she'd somehow figured out the true identity of the corpse or that of Emma's abductor, she would have done whatever it took to find her daughter and bring her home again.
Vanessa was in terrible danger. He could feel it in the pit of his stomach.
She had told him Warren didn't keep any files at home for legal reasons, but Trey tossed the room anyway. He pulled the boxes out of the closet and dumped them, knocked every book off of the bookcase, and scanned the computer for anything resembling patient records.
He was wasting time.
His sister was out there somewhere, and possibly in desperate need of help.
He never should have left her alone in the first place.
Never.
Trey dialed Vanessa's cell phone again and sprinted for his car.
He couldn't hear the muffled ringtone from inside the purse on the corner table.
Vanessa walked on the sidewalk until it eventually gave way to a dirt shoulder narrowed by the proliferation of the impregnable forest. Spanish moss hung from the branches of trees packed so tightly together she rarely saw the hint of moonlight reflecting from the stagnant marsh beyond. Somewhere nearby, amphibians croaked and predatory birds shrieked, but there was no way she could hear them over the deafening song of the cicadas. They filled every tree and every inch of airspace over the gravel road. Buzzing around her head, between the cypresses. Groups of them lagged behind and then raced back ahead of her and waited in the boughs for her to catch up. She had never seen a million of anything, yet she was certain that there had to be at least that many cicadas. The world around her had become a living swarm, as though the individual molecules of oxygen had been replaced by the red-eyed bugs.
They guided her onward into the night, swept up like a drowning body carried out to sea by the tide. No headlights pierced the roiling darkness, not that she expected to see any. Not this late at night, and not in this unincorporated area. The tracts of land out here were all multi-acre lots situated primarily on marshland, designed for complete privacy. Rutted dirt drives forked from the road every half-mile on the right hand side. To the left lay nothing but uninterrupted bayou that stretched clear to Louisiana. The houses out here were a mixture of ramshackle trailer homes set into the deep woods and sprawling estates that were so secluded from one another as to negate the socioeconomic differences. These were reclusive families that valued nothing more than isolation and wouldn't soon be organizing any neighborhood picnics. Vanessa knew several people who lived out here, but hadn't visited enough times to recognize their patches of wilderness in the dark.
She wondered why she was even out here. Why in the world was she following a swarm of locusts anyway?
The answer was simple.
Hope.
Maybe she had finally relinquished the slippery grasp she held on her sanity. The rational part of her mind, now a distant voice calling from the bottom of a deep well, insisted that she turn around and abandon this absurd course of action, but her heart was persistent. It demanded that she try anything, no matter how irrational, if there was even the slightest chance of finding her daughter. It forced the blood into the legs that carried her onward of their own accord, diverting it from the brain that struggled to make sense of the senseless.
She had lost track of time. There was only the darkness and the shrill cacophony of cicadas. She didn't know how long she had been walking when the swarm closed in upon her so tightly that she was forced to stop and cover her head with her hands to shield it from the insects. After a moment, they again ascended and buzzed off down a shadowed driveway into the forest. The mailbox at the junction was dented and rusted along the metal creases. It bore only five numbers. No name, just 10782.
If there was a point of no return, she had reached it. To follow the private lane meant trespassing and admitting that she had placed her fate in the hands of a swarm of cicadas. To turn around was to acquiesce to the fear and live with the ramifications of abandoning all hope.
There really was no choice at all.
She mounted the dirt drive and wended into the morass. Standing water, gray with algae, winked at her through the tree trunks to either side of the mounded track, which grew subtly steeper with each step. Eventually, it opened into a broad clearing, at the center of which was a knoll crowned by a Spanish-style hacienda with a red ceramic-tile roof and porticos flanking either side. That was the extent of the detail she could glean through the mass of cicadas that covered every available surface. They filled the ring of trees around the manicured yard and turned the formerly white house black. All of them had settled. Not a single insect flew through the air. They just watched. She felt millions of blood-red eyes focused upon her.
And none of them made a sound.
The silence was so intense that every noise, from the scuff of her feet on the dirt to the thrum of her pulse in her ears, seemed amplified a hundredfold.
She recognized this place. It had to have been more than five years since she had been here last, but there was no doubt about to whom the house belonged.
And her heart broke.
There was no way that her daughter was here. These were normal people, albeit more reserved: an educated husband, a domestic wife, and a pampered child.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. She had allowed herself to hope, allowed herself to believe that some greater power had sent the cicadas to lead her to Emma. Instead, she found herself face-to-face with the grim truth.
Emma wasn't here.
She was undoubtedly buried somewhere in the bayou where the gators and snapping turtles had laid waste to her flesh. Her husband was gone. She was lost and alone. There was nothing at all left for her in this life, and the time had finally come to end it.
Vanessa was just about to turn around and embark upon the last long walk that would end with an overdose of Sominex when something caught her eye. At first, she hadn't noticed it with all of the black insects on the house.
She walked silently across the lawn.
Countless crimson eyes followed.
The majority of the houses built at the edge of the swamp didn't have basements. The water table and the shifting soil forced most to be built upon aboveground foundations. This elevated crest must have provided the necessary stability to support the garden-level basement that featured windows set nearly flush with the ground. From the distance, she had assumed they were hidden behind a living skin of cicadas like the rest of the house...until she caught just the faintest hint of reflected silver light.
